In the sorry past of the country, Hungary endured without a written constitution, just like the United Kingdom. Fortunately, the “light” arrived from the East, and Hungary received its first written constitution from the Soviet Union in 1949. Under this document, Hungary would enjoy one of the harshest totalitarian regimes in the region during the first part of the 1950s.
When the Soviet experiment collapsed like a wet sock, jurists from Hungary’s opposition parties joined members of the ruling Socialist Party and re-wrote the constitution, heavily amending it. It was adopted in 1989 by the last Socialist Parliament. Sooner or later, it was thought, a new, definitive constitution would need to be created, but neither political party was yet up to the task. Hungary then had the distinction of being the sole former Eastern bloc nation that did not adopt a wholly new constitution after the fall of the Soviet Union.
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